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When DNA profiling was first introduced into the American legal system in late 1987, judges and prosecutors heralded it as the ‘greatest advance in crime fighting technology since fingerprints’ (People of New York v. George Wesley and Cameron Bailey 1988). Press accounts proclaimed that the technique would ‘revolutionize’ law enforcement (Lewis 1988; Marx 1988; Moss 1988). In many ways, it has. In the past two decades, DNA evidence has been used in the USA to solve countless violent crimes that might otherwise have been relegated to cold case files, putting thousands upon thousands of rapists and murderers behind bars and inducing guilty pleas from thousands more. Arrest warrants have been issued based solely on crime scene DNA profiles (Bieber 2002; Denver District Attorney 2008). Millions of profiles are now stored in a national DNA database, ready to be used in the aid of criminal investigations around the country. DNA evidence has even been used to free more than 250 ‘wrongfully convicted’ individuals from prison – until recently a uniquely American phenomenon that signals both the problems inherent in the country's criminal justice system and its faith in the power of science to bring the truth to light (Innocence Project 2010).

Yet, the introduction and development of DNA profiling in the USA has been far from perfect. Although closure, if not complete resolution, has been achieved in the majority of debates over molecular biology and population genetics that once affected the legal admissibility of the technique (Thompson 1993; Derksen 2003; Aronson 2007; Lynch et al. 2008), several issues remain inadequately addressed by the scientific and legal communities.

This article explores the FBI's early efforts to develop and implement a standardized DNA profiling regime in a legal and scientific landscape shaped by strong defense challenges to the technique. Although the FBI claimed numerous times that its standardization efforts were purely ‘technical’, the FBI knew it had to create a social infrastructure that would serve to ensure the validity and reliability of the forensic DNA evidence. At the center of the system would be the FBI, serving as the obligatory, if reluctant, passage point for both technical and social exchanges. The FBI decided largely by fiat that forensic scientists based in public crime laboratories, but with little molecular biology and genetics training, bore the primary responsibility for setting standards, as well as carrying out, forensic DNA analysis. At the same time, the FBI actively excluded representatives from the private biotechnology companies that introduced the technique into the legal system, as well as the members of the defense community that were responsible for highlighting potential problems with the technique in court.

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